[leafnode-list] 2.0b8_ma9 resource usage on P-150

[Stroller <stroller@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday 06 Feb 2002 11:10 pm, Matthias Andree wrote:
> Stroller schrieb am Mittwoch, den 06. Februar 2002:
> > 2.0b8_ma9 *seems* to be hogging resources a bit on my poor old P-150 -
> > everything else is running a bit slowly, and connections to kNode are now
> > timing out some, if fetchnews is running, too. Is this expected
> > behaviour..?
>
> Actually, it's not. However, old machines tend to have less powerful IDE
> chips, and if your disk drive runs in PIO mode, that may hog down things
> a bit, and if it's slow, particularly so.

I assumed that was the case - your version appears to spawn extra threads, or 
fork 5 child processes, or something. Presumably this makes more efficient 
downloading, but also for a little extra work for an old system like this - 
it has to write articles to disk faster, "5 at a time". Internet connection 
has is 512kbps ADSL, which is new to me.

>Do
> these happen around posting articles or just at any time it likes to? Is
> knode also running on that Pentium 150?

kNode (0.6.1 under KDE2.2.1) runs on a nearby PIII 500, connected via a 
10base100 switch.

> Is your news spool on a local file system (reiserfs/ext2/ext3) or across
> a Samba (smbfs) mount?

It is local to the P150 on which leafnode runs, on a 2gig EIDE hard-drive. I 
can't recall the exact specification of the h/d, but it was brand new (from a 
warranty return) about 2.5 years ago. It is probably of average specification 
for the time the original drive was bought, in 1997.

I was considering updating the harddrive in the forseeable future, to 
something like an 80gig or 100gig drive, for spool/news & network filespace 
(DVD -> DivX rendering can use 20gig per disk using "FairUse"). Since I'm 
fairly new to Linux & not up to date on hardware, I'd be grateful for any 
comments - is a 7200rpm drive worth the extra money..? Would I be advised to 
upgrade to a 2nd-hand Celeron or PII & m/b at the same time..?

Sorry, I know this is OT.

> Are these timeouts related to fetchnews running at the same time and do
> they go away when there is no fetchnews active at the same time?

Yes, exactly. I disabled freshnews, and deleted everything except 
interesting.groups from /var/spool/news to make sure it wasn't a migration 
issue, then "rm -Rf /home/stroller/.kde/share/apps/knode/nttp.*" on the 
client, so I could setup the server details & counts clean.

I then ran fetchnews, so it d/loaded *all* my regular groups from the server 
fresh again. I susbscribed knode to 1/2 of them, hit retrieve, & groups 
were available in seconds. I then went out for a while, and when I came back 
subscribed the the remainder of the groups with kNode. I hit retrieve, and it 
started getting articles; when I ran fetchnews it slowed, then timed out 
about a minute later. After leafnode wrote 
/var/spool/news/uk/telecom/broadband/.overview, kNode was able to sync again.

freshnews was formerly running with an update frequency of c 10 minutes - 1.9 
was fine like this, but I regret to say this made 2.0b8_ma9 unusable.

Stroller.

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